The property inspection is a key piece of the escrow process where the buyer conducts their due diligence about the property they're considering purchasing.
The inspector is a licensed professional that typically comes out to the house in the first 3-5 days of the contract period and checks out every system in the house as well as reviewing the appliances and finishes of the home. They then produce a 30-60 page report detailing their findings.
The challenge with this process in the Real Estate industry is two fold:
1.) Because the inspector can't guarantee anything going wrong in the future, lots of the language in the report is written with feeling of open ended concern or warnings about monitoring conditions to make sure future problems don't develop.
Here is the thing. Every house is pretty similar barring some catastrophic developments. The problem with these reports is many times it ends up sounding like the house WILL have problems later, even if they won't.
2.) The second problem is that city and county building codes change every year or two and if the inspector is using a software that shows the most up to date codes, pretty much every house thats built in 2023 or before is going to start having things called out in the report that are not "to code."
Thousands of people live in homes and meticulously maintain them and never have any issues with any of their home's systems. That same home could then get inspected and have 30-40 pages of items called out as not being "up to date."
If you're a first time home buyer, that could be scary when you read a report talking about how out of date everything is.
It's critical that the buyer's agent walks the buyer through the report and helps them actually understand the true condition of the house, looking "through" the potentially alarmist language to understand why it was written that way.
Perfect Example: Many years ago an inspection was done on one of my listings and the inspector wrote the following:
"Hairline cracks observed in the foundation which is normal, but should be monitored going forward as widening of existing cracks could indicate future foundation problems."
The buyer terminated during the option period because he said "he didn't want future foundation problems."
I called the buyer's agent to explain the report clearly states everything is normal and is simply giving the same cautionary advice that would be written about ANY house.
Unfortunately, that agent was very inexperienced and was not able to convey this to their first time home buyer. The buyer got cold feet over a perceived future problem that didn't exist.
Yet another reason to always ask the agent you're considering working with, about their personal production.
There is nothing rude about verifying that the person you're asking to guide your Real Estate journey over the next 2-4 months has been down that road enough times to know how to get to the finish line and how to read an inspection report.